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Hell: A Burning Ring of Fire

Rumors of war, hurricanes, floods and now fires. All we lack, at this writing, are earthquakes and wed have the complete picture of the Apocalypse. I can understand my more orthodox friends of all faiths wondering at this conjunction and trying to read divine signs from the devilish events that swirl around us in currents of flood and flames.

Last night’s sunset was incredible as the setting sun reflected off the particulates suspended in the atmosphere. Quite a show. Not so entertaining for the people being burned out or forced to evacuate. We have friends who can’t get home and may not have homes when they do return to their neighborhoods.

We, here in Southern California, can turn our attention from lingering results of floods and hurricanes in other parts of the country back to ourselves. We have arrived at our own fire season. End of October and we have both Local Warming and the Santana winds. Some scholars hold that the name is not related to the town of Santa Ana, as popularly believed, but from Satana, or Satans wind. I’m inclined to accept this etymology.

Over night we jumped from 70s to high 90s. 40 mph winds are blowing off the desert, being concentrated in the passes and canyons, and then roaring out of the canyons at better than 90 mph and into Southern California.

The air is chewy with smoke. The smell of burning forests, brush, trees, and houses fills the nostrils. Heavier, even than the air, is the general sense of dread that many seem to be carrying in our hearts.

A startling number of people look at the gray-black smoke in the air and the strange orange glow in the evening sky and remark, “Looks like the end of the world.” And, of course, it is the end of the world for those injured by smoke and fire, and the countless spiritual losses for those whose homes are gone.

I wonder. Do we have a sense of doom from somewhere in our limbic lizard brain? Do we, deep in our genetic code, remember the air of 65 million years ago when a meteor strike created a non-nuclear and non-convivial atmosphere for the world’s greatest, up till then, species? Could our sense of doom and foreboding be memory or precognition?

The night sky is a hellish red–as if there were several glowing sunsets coming from various directions. But each direction betokens another fire, another source of lossloss potentially of life, of homes, of memories. From every direction comes a reflection of destruction.

As I write this, I can see the clouds of black smoke billowing into the daytime sky and the fires glow in the evening. It looks much closer than I know it to be. It smells as if it is already here. And it is here. If you smell it, you are breathing it–the incinerated particles of people’s lives.

There are thick clouds of smoke. Its rank smell overwhelms my senses. It stings my eyes and tears rolls down my cheeks. My voice is not my own. It has a catch in it. An allergic reaction or emotional? I don’t know. I’m not sure it makes a difference.

Already, before we can knock the fires down, before containment is in sight, the blame game begins. Pundits are scolding the burned-out or vulnerable for having had homes that could burn. “They shouldn’t build homes in the hills. They were foolish to build in and amongst the trees.”

This is another version of the old line about the people who choose to live by the beach. “They get what they deserve when the storms come and the waves destroy their homes.” I guess all the people from Florida to Texas are fools for building in a place where hurricanes destroyed so many homes. Blame the Katrina victims for living where they did. The people all along the Gulf and East Coast are selfish if they expect the government to help them rebuild. They chose to live there.

I guess the people in the Mid West should be blamed for living where tornadoes regularly lay siege to small towns and big trailer parks. The victims should have known better and built their homesUh, where?

The West Coast has fires and earthquakes. The Mid West has tornadoes and is long over-due for an earthquake. The biggest quake in post Pilgrim times was in the Tennessee Valley. The East Coast has hurricanes. So, just where shall we live?

“Ok, but why ask for trouble and build in the hills and canyons?” Where else? It may make more sense to build in the hills than on the valley floors. We plowed under the crops and cut down the trees. One would be hard pressed to find an orange grove in ill-named Orange County.

We need to find a modus vivendi, a way of preserving and protecting nature while living in something other than concrete jungles. Generations separated from nature will not preserve and protect it, will not respect nature’s harsh amorality and amazing power.

The world is big, complex, and dangerous. There is no place to go, to build and to live where nature cannot give some self-righteous critic the ability to blame us for living.

The fires will go out. The smoke will clear. The trees will grow back. Nature is pretty tough. Human beings are amazingly resilient and filled with hope and healthy denial. The houses will be rebuilt.

Life is not safe. We see walls of flame, burning homes, forests and whole communities swept away by wind and flood. We are always vulnerable, tied by the thinnest thread to this fragile miracle of Life. The world is dangerous and nature capricious. Chaos theory indicates some hint of order of patterns, but the sea cannot be controlled any more than the winds, flames or the tectonic plates.